Scientists learn much about humans from birds' singing lessons

Why wasn't this intruder getting the message? The lord of the manor had warned him repeatedly to back off, with threatening gestures and loud admonitions. But the trespasser just sat there, and kept singing. So, in a flurry of feathers, the resident sparrow dived for his challenger's head.

Michael Beecher, a University of Washington biologist, finally stepped in to end the brawl, retrieving the stuffed sparrow and mini-speaker that tricked the real bird into believing his territory had been overrun.

Foe vanquished, the sparrow fluffed himself up, perched high in a tree and let loose a cascade of trills and whistles.

"That's the king-of-the-mountain song," Beecher said.

Beecher understands better than most the messages that pass between song sparrows. He and his students have been studying the birds' communication patterns in Seattle's Discovery Park for more than 25 years. The duel he orchestrated on a recent morning provided an opportunity to record the sotto voce song that males use only when confronting interlopers.

The way birds learn their songs is similar to the way babies learn to talk and adults master a golf swing, University of Washington brain researchers say. And studies of the seasonal changes in bird brains are revealing neurological twists that one day might be harnessed to heal human brains damaged by stroke,Alzheimer's diseaseand other disorders.

"The strength of the songbird system is that you can go down to the very detailed, micro-level … then explain how that leads to changes in behavior," UW neurobiologist David Perkel said. "That's something not a lot of neuroscience can do."

It was research on songbirds that upset the long-held notion that most animals — and most certainly humans — were born with all the gray matter they would ever have.

Working with canaries and chickadees in the 1980s, Fernando Nottebohm at The Rockefeller University found brain regions associated with song and the ability to locate hidden caches of food were constantly birthing new cells.

Scientists soon discovered neurons sprouting in other brain areas and in the brains of other animals — including Homo sapiens.

Many birds are hatched with vocalizations hard-wired into their brains. But the 4,000 species that comprise the songbirds must learn how to sing properly. Perkel's research focuses on zebra finches, which study and memorize the songs of adults. At first, the fledglings jabber or sing snippets, gradually improving until what comes out of their beaks matches the template in their memory banks.

"It's a model for speech learning in humans," Perkel said.

Perkel is convinced the parallels extend to all types of learning that require practice and feedback, from memorizing multiplication tables to honing a golf swing or ski jump.

"We think that by cracking this circuit in birds," he said, "it will have a large impact on our understanding of the brain mechanisms involved in learning a broad variety of skills."

Listen to birds

The Internet is atwitter with birding sites that offer videos and audio of birds. Here are three websites where you can see and hear hundreds of birds and their distinctive calls:

Cornell Lab of Ornithology (birds.cornell.edu and click on the "All About Birds" link)